Back in the 90s I went to Saskatoon for our friend Jacob's† wedding (as far as I know, crazily enough, they're still together). A lot of the other guys were there too.

It was one of those ridiculous weddings where the church ceremony is early in the day, and then the reception is an ungodly wait away. In this case I think the actual church part was at 10am, and was over within 45 minutes. So by 11am we're set loose in the city of Saskatoon, and the reception didn't start until 6pm. That's seven hours to kill. I've been to a few weddings that do this, and it's really sort of mental when you think about it. A lot of people traveled to Saskatchewan for this event, many on transcontinental flights. Why not do the ceremony at 2pm and then a service at 5pm. How much sex did the married couple really need to stuff in between the two events?

So anyways, with seven hours to kill in Saskatchewan, one of the guys David† decides what he really really really needed to do was see strippers. This being the days before cellphones and ubiquitous internet access, we had no way of determining where the strip clubs in Saskatoon were, so we were forced to consult...

...[millenials, can you guess? -ed]

...

...The Yellow Pages.‡ Where did we find the Yellow Pages? On a metallic cord affixed to the corner of a payphone in the hotel lobby. Yeah, that retro. So we go through the Yellow Pages trying to find us a quality nudie show.

But oddly enough, Yellow Pages don't have a "stripper" section [though they probably do in Atlanta -ed]. In Saskatchewan you're hard pressed to even find a "nightclub" section. Instead we went through the half-page "Bars" section without finding anything hinting to where you can go have a Pilsner and watch a blond girl dance in only high heels. That left only one section left, and we went into it knowing it was a minefield: Adult.

You know what Adult means. We did too, of course. Still, we were hopeful that one of the organizations in the Adult section wasn't just an escort agency or a rub-and-tug, but a place where you can get a drink in the presence of nipple. Unlike the bars section, or the "transmission" section, or the "restaurant" section, or the "vacuum truck services" section, Adult went on for pages and pages and pages.§ It wasn't an easy slog, and we deliberately decided that a strip club would, if not feature a large ad, at the very least have a name that convinced you that you knew what they offered.

None jumped out at us for this purpose, until Ammon† found one with a name I can't remember, but he was pretty sure if there was a strip club to be found in Saskatchewan, that would be the one. So we called them up to find out if they could fulfill our desires. Of course, "we" can't fit onto a payphone so it fell upon Samson† to make the call. The rest of us just listened in to half the conversation as Samson sussed out the details of the (unknown to us) system in the province of Saskatchewan:"Hi, is this ?
(pause)Okay, yes, sorry I just a question for you, sorry...are you like, a bar?
(pause)No? Okay, we're from Alberta. Just wondering if you can help us, do you know where there is a ba..
(pause)Oh..so there aren't any in the city?
(pause)None in all of Saskatchewan? Oh, okay, thanks for your help."

For the rest of us, we could hear the news start to go south somewhere along the "no, we're from Alberta" part. I think at that juncture we realized how far we could fall, though it was still disillusioning to learn the truth.

Namely, the closest nudie joint was Lloydminster [assuming, even, that the Wayside Inn hadn't been closed down by then, this was before Kooler opened. -ed], meaning that at a bare minimum we were a two and a half hour drive away from naked girls, and that meant having to spend another two and a half hours driving back. That would consume 5 of our 7 hours, true, but leave us two hours at the peelers. We were also at that point as far from a return to Edmonton as we were from Saskatoon, and the discussion seriously went to the topic of leaving for strippers and not returning since David was really really horny and needed to see naked chicks. (Again, this was before you could just whip out your...phone)

David was seriously talking about even going back home to Calgary just to get his naked girl desires satisfied. The other option, besides abandoning Jacob entirely, was that we get a call girl hired to come up to David's hotel room and strip for us, allowing us the chance to drink and watch a stripper at the same time. The odds of David sleeping with said call girl was somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100%, which was obviously a problem for Samson who was sharing a room with him (not much of a problem) but wouldn't get a call girl to sleep with of his own (a problem). There was also the financing issue, whereby David planned on using the cash he brought to give as a wedding present to facilitate his need to have an erection during the 7 hour wait for the reception to begin. No, seriously, that dude has problems.

Cooler heads (no pun intended) eventually prevailed, however, and we ended up going to see a movie instead. In fact, we never did end up going to a bar for even a drink, waiting instead until the reception. This was, I mean to stress, "back in the day" when a wedding reception was a cheaper, rather than a more expensive, place to drink than a bar or pub was. Jacob got got his full wedding present, the Saskatchewan call girl economy lost out on potential revenue, and we all ended up actually attending the reception -- where I ended up with a girl at the end while David was desperately hitting on everything with a vagina until long after midnight.

Thanks to Premier Wall, these sort of wacky stories will continue to come about in the Province of Saskatchewan.

† All the names in this story have been changed. For semi-obvious reasons, David is named after David Duchovny.

‡ At the time it was funny, but in retrospect the infamous Yellow Pages scene from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is actually totally understandable. Barely a quarter century after the film it's already weird to think of how you'd find a business that performed an unfamiliar service you required if you woke up one morning back in 1986. That 23rd century computers and networks and Wikipedia would leave heroes struggling to know what Yellow Pages were in 20th century earth seems obvious now, though it was a kitschy joke at the time.

§ Of course, hookers aren't the largest section of the yellow pages. well, at least not sexual hookers. The largest category in the Yellow Pages will still screw you and take your money afterwards, but your dick is oddly dry during the entire ordeal.